


From Cold to Fire

by FrostedFox



Category: Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Hawkeye (Comics)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-09
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-24 06:26:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/631419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrostedFox/pseuds/FrostedFox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s shivering. She won’t stop shivering.<br/>“Stop that,” he says.<br/>“Stop what?”<br/>“Shaking. It’s driving me crazy.”<br/>“D-d-deal with it,” she stammers, and he pulls her closer into his arms.<br/>--</p><p>I love you only because it's you the one I love;<br/> I hate you deeply, and hating you<br/> Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you<br/> Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.<br/>- Pablo Neruda</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She’s shivering. She won’t stop shivering. 

“Stop that,” he says. 

“Stop what?”

“Shaking. It’s driving me crazy.”

“D-d-deal with it,” she stammers, and he pulls her closer into his arms. 

 This is inappropriate. He should not be holding her, touching her, he isn’t worthy of her. But he can’t leave her here like this. It’s nothing, he reminds himself. Clint had phoned Bruce earlier, explaining the symptoms, hesitantly reaching out to touch Kate’s forehead. 

 That was first contact. He almost snorts at the thought, now. She was sweating and shaking and coughing and snuffling and Bruce said it was a cold. A common cold with a side of fever. Nothing to worry about. But Clint had never been sick, can’t remember being sick. Not since he was - well, Kate’s age. A kid. 

 All he knows is that it looks miserable, and he doesn’t want to leave her like this, so he pushes her hair behind her ear, and she turns away from him. 

“You’re so hot,” she says. 

“And you’re shaking. Or delirious.” 

Kate groans.

“I meant your temperature. I might be dying. I look atrocious. Leave me alone.”

“Do you want me to go?”

“Not really,” she says. “But I hate you.”

“I know,” he says, and smiles. She tries to smile too but just ends up grimacing and rolling over and further away from him so she can lie on her stomach, piling her arms under the pillow and wheezing into it.

“You want anything?” Clint offers.

“No.”

“Okay, I’ll just ... I’ll sit over here,” Clint says, crossing the room and sitting on the chair, just watching her. Kate closes her eyes and slows her breathing, but she doesn’t sleep. Clint can tell when she’s sleeping. It’s one of the things about compulsively being so hyper alert. 

 Definitely not because he knows what Kate sounds like when she sleeps.


	2. Chapter 2

He’s in the kitchen when he hears her voice. Soft, at first, and then louder. He looks at the coffee once before taking off towards her room. He opens the door a little too quickly. 

She’s thrashing around, and as Clint contemplates what to do with her, she bolts upright. Her eyes skim the room frantically and her breathing slows. She locks eyes with him and cringes back. Just a little, but Clint notices. 

“Kate?” She shakes her head at him. He sits on the side of the bed and pushes her hair away from where it cling to her face. “You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. A dream, I guess.”

“Nightmare?”  

“Nightmare. You were - no. Doesn’t matter.” Clint wants to know; he needs to know, but he won’t press her for it. He can’t. 

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Stop looking so worried.”

“I look worried? You’re the one with the 110 BPM rate.”

Kate tried to smile, but her eyes went a bit cloudy as she fell back on her pillow. “I hate you,” she said, “Will you stay with me?”

“Sure thing, Katie,” Clint said as Kate rolled over onto her side, facing away from him again.


	3. Chapter 3

An hour passes and Clint is jolted into consciousness by Kate’s groan, the sound becoming a little too familiar. She sits up, stretching out her arms, hair clinging to her face despite his earlier attempts to push it away. She slept well this time.

“I look like death,” she says, almost a question. Clint raises his eyebrows.

“Honest answer?”

“I hate you,” she says, reaching out her arms for him now. He moves to sit beside her, unsure of what to do or what she wants. She seems unsure herself, so Clint turns to her and turns her by the shoulders so she faces away from him. He pulls back her hair.

“Here,” he says, and begins to separate it into pieces, delicate fingers sliding over her scalp. She shivers under his hands.

“Where did you learn how to braid?”

“Espionage 101.”

Kate snorts in response, not pressing further. Clint finishes the braid and reaches over to the desk where an elastic band is, probably from the Daily Bugle. He wraps it around her hair and releases it with a snap. Kate turns back to face him.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t worry about it. You okay?”

“Thirsty.”

“Wait here,” Clint says, a little too excited. God, he sounds like a mother hen or something. He brings back the water and a bottle of aspirin. “It’ll help,” he insists. Kate looks skeptical, but takes one anyways. She trusts him. One of those things he doesn’t like to think about lest the weight of it settle in. He pats her shoulder awkwardly and she looks at him through her eyelashes. He hates-loves-loathes when she does that, and she knows it.

“Wanna nap with me?”

“Sure,” he says, because that look and those eyes and the voice and goddamnit he can’t say no to her. They settle in and she curls into him. He rubs her back until she’s asleep - this time really asleep - and curses his own existence.


	4. Chapter 4

He wakes up to see her stumbling around the room. She’s trying to take off her sweat pants, he realizes. He goes back to pretending he’s asleep. He only peeks twice; once when something - a lamp - crashes to the floor, and again when she slides back under the blankets of her bed. 

So clumsy, he thinks, but sickness is supposed to disorient you, and people like him and Kate rely on being oriented to survive, so without the sense they’re both lost. Reflecting on the irony of this when it comes to his moral compass fleets through his mind before he decides he doesn’t feel like feeling depressed. 

“Clint,” she whispers. “Clint. I know you’re awake.” He opens his eyes.  
“You broke my lamp,” he says in his own defense.  
“Did not. Only the bulb.”  
“Clumsy,” he accuses.  
“Shut up. I’m sick.”  
“Gonna use that as an excuse forever now?” She kicks him. “You don’t want to play this game with me Katie-Kate, I always win.”  
“Oh yeah?” She kicks him again, and in response he traps her foot within his own.   
“Yeah,” he says, victorious.  
“I hate you,” she whispers. Then leans in to kiss him.


	5. Chapter 5

Three days later Clint starts coughing, and then shivering, and then sweating. Kate brings him tea he doesn’t drink and covers him in all of the blankets in the house. He sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps, and when he wakes Kate is sitting beside him, loyal as anything. 

“Looks like it’s your turn,” she says. 

He hasn’t been sick since he was young. He meets her eyes. He rasps, “I hate you.”

She grins. “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> I do not love you except because I love you;   
> I go from loving to not loving you,  
>  From waiting to not waiting for you   
> My heart moves from cold to fire.
> 
>   I love you only because it's you the one I love;   
> I hate you deeply, and hating you  
>  Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you  
>  Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.  
> 
> Maybe January light will consume   
> My heart with its cruel   
> Ray, stealing my key to true calm.    
> In this part of the story I am the one who   
> Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,  
>  Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood. 
> 
> \- Pablo Neruda


End file.
